Near Field Connectivity Blog

At WIMA 2012 in Monaco, Nokia announced a new NFC smartphone. The Nokia Lumia 610 NFC.

The device is Nokia's 1st Windows Phone NFC enabled smartphone.

Using the Lumia 610 as a reference product design, Nokia in cooperation with partners added the NFC support. The device, just like its predecessor, is powered by Windows Phone 7.5 operating system. For general detailed specifications on the Lumia 610 please visit our device specification section. Further I will concentrate on general overview of the "NFC" part of the Lumia 610 NFC.

NFC support

Nokia worked together with INSIDE Secure, a company well known in the NFC industry for providing leading NFC solutions, to integrate NFC hardware and software support on top of the already established Lumia 610 product. 

Supporting Operating Modes

• Peer-2-peer

The device supports peer-2-peer exchange over the NFC radio. The supported protocols are SNEP (Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol) and the lower level LLCP (Logical Link Control Protocol)

• Reader/writer

The device is able to read and write to a number of NFC tags. Supported technologies are NFC forum Type 1,2,3,4 (Including Topaz, Ultralight C, NTag, Felica, DesFire, ISO-14443 Type A/B, ..), Mifare Std, Kovio and others

• Virtual Tag

The device is able to simulate an NDEF Type 4 Tag

• Card Emulation

The device is able to emulate a SmartCard, with data exchange with a SIM based card application over SWP (Single Wire Protocol) supporting payment and ticketing use cases (Secure NFC

MasterCard PayPass® and Visa payWave® certified   

The Nokia Lumia 610 NFC passed Mastercard and Visa contactless payment certification.

Availability

The Nokia Lumia 610 NFC is initially planned to be available with Orange later this year. Other markets and operators availablity has not been announced yet.

APIs and functionalities

The above mentioned functionalities are exposed via the InsideSecure's Open-NFC platform. It includes APIs to access the whole NFC functionality enabling creation of a variety of NFC application use cases. InsideSecure made a port of the Open NFC platform to Microsoft Platforms. Visit the Open NFC platform pages for more details. 

3rd party application development

To develop NFC applications for the Lumia 610 NFC developers need the standard Windows Phone development environment  plus:

• Open NFC for WP libraries
• Nokia Lumia 610 NFC device with custom firmware 

At the moment the Open NFC WP7 port/addon is not publicly available.

Partners of Nokia (including Nokia Developer PRO and Launchpad program members) are invited to contact their Nokia contact person or send a query to nokia.developer.PRO@nokia.com for detailed information and requirements.

Distribution of NFC enabled apps in Microsoft Marketplace

In order to be offered for the Lumia 610 NFC, 3rd party apps must be signed by either Nokia or a mobile operator. This will enable them to be published in Windows Phone Marketplace. The application developers must also ensure that the application will install and work also on non-NFC enabled Windows Phone phones, i.e. by disabling the NFC features of the application to the user

More info to follow!

Nokia 603 with Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 and Nokia 808 Pureview are ready for implementing Payment and Ticketing solutions! In this post I will go into the details on Secure NFC implementation and how developers can get started in development of secure NFC applications on Nokia Symbian devices.

Support for SIM based NFC architecture using SWP protocol

Secure storage and provisioning of sensitive information (i.e. Credit Card details, values, PINs etc) needed to perform secure transactions with mobile devices is handled by the UICC/SIM card. Nokia HW/SW provides a channel for both external NFC infrastructure (POS readers, transit terminals, OTA provisioning) as well as on-device UI applications (wallets) to be able to securely exchange data over SWP protocol with the secure applications stored (and managed) on the SIM card.

Card Emulation mode

The Symbian NFC component has now added support for Card Emulation mode and it works interchangeably to peer-2-peer mode and reader mode when NFC radio is active. In card emulation mode all communication with the NFC radio is routed directly to the SIM card via the SWP protocol. The communication is usually in the form of ADPU packets follwoing the ISO 14443 standard (Smart Cards)

Typical architecture

In a typical use case the MNO will issue to the customer a UICC enabled SIM card. Additionally it could offer the customer a contactless payment or ticketing service (in partnership with a local Bank, loyalty or transportation service).

Subject to service agreement with the customer, the operator or service provider will issue the related payment or transportation cardlet to the user's SIM card using a provisioning service provider or TSM (Trusted Service Manager). TSM's role is to manage the secure provisioning & management of payment and ticketing services to end users. Usually this provisioning is done using OTA (Over-the-air) deployment (using BIP - bearer independent protocol).

The provisioning of these services may also include a dedicated Wallet application that is installed on the customers device which can then manage all (or some) the cards stored on the customer's SIM card and is actually what the customer sees and uses to perform transactions with contactless/NFC infrastructure.

Low Battery mode

In payment and ticketing use cases it is important to offer customers NFC/contactless services in cases when the phone battery runs out (i.e. to be able to use transportation or to pay for services). To satisfy requirements Nokia has implemented an operator variant customizable Low Battery mode which will enable to make a few transactions with the card emulation mode in cases where the device will shut down due to low battery.

Devices supporting Card Emulation

Nokia 603 with Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 and Nokia 808 Pureview

Note: at the time of writing the Nokia 603 has received MasterCard Paypass certification

Development environment:

Development of Card Emulation solutions differs a bit from regular mobile application development as it requires more infrastructure capabilities. One might say that the wallet development is the easy part, the more challenging part is to have the right e-2-e infrastructure. Usually the solutions on mobile devices have 2 parts,

- the Wallet UI application (managing user's cards and for listening, preparing cards for transactions). For the Wallet UI application the Development environment is Java ME

- the "card" applications (cardlets, applets) running on the SIM card. For the "Card" applications the development environment depends on the SIM manufacturer (usually JavaCard technology)

Recommended Development Setup 

• Nokia 603 with Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 or Nokia 808 Pureview
• Symbian Belle SDK  v1.0.
• Secure NFC plugin for Symbian 1.0. (available to Nokia Launchpad/PRO member companies only)
• Java ME IDE
• SWP enabled UICC/SIM card with corresponding access control configuration and policies
• Certificate capable of signing midlets into the Operator domain

Related APIs 

• Contacltess Communications API (JSR257)

The Contactless Communications API defines support to exchaning information between contactless targets

• Security and trust Services API  (JSR177)

The Security and Trust Services API for J2ME defines support for smart card communication, generation of digital signatures, and low-level cryptography operations.

Nokia extensions to the JSR257 API

• FakePower off API

API for receiving notifications about the low battery mode state (i.e. to alert the user) 

• Branding API

API for registering post transaction events. (i.e. play video, show bitmap, launch application)

Examples

• Wallet

Nokia made available an example application demonstrating a typical wallet application supporting contactless transactions using all the necessary APIs and available as source code. (The project is available to Nokia Developer Launchpad/PRO members only)

Avaliability 

The mentioned enablers for building NFC enabled payment & ticketing solutions on Nokia Symbian devices are available to Nokia Developer Launchpad and PRO members only.

• If you are a member you can get access to the above mentioned tools and example by simply writing an email to nokia.developer.PRO@nokia.com requesting access.
• If you are not a member of any of the developer programs but would still like to get access, I suggest you to apply for a Nokia Developer Launchpad membership, it's easy and free.